


I don't suppose you know how to cure palladium poisoning?

by CheyanneChika



Category: Captain America - All Media Types, Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Broken Brainwashing, Bucky Barnes Has PTSD, Bucky Barnes serves his time but he does it before Steve and Tony can get in a big fight over it, Canon Divergence - Avengers (2012), Canon Divergence - Iron Man 2, Identity Porn, Long, M/M, Not Captain America: The Winter Soldier Compliant, Past Brainwashing, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Prisoner James "Bucky" Barnes, Rehabilitation, Secret Identity, Slow Build, Slow Burn, mildly
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-05-21
Updated: 2018-08-26
Packaged: 2019-05-09 23:33:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 4,642
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14725697
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CheyanneChika/pseuds/CheyanneChika
Summary: Bucky breaks through the brainwashing long enough to get arrested.  Free from Hydra's control, but feeling guilty all the same, Bucky is prepared to do his time.He hadn't planned on letting Agent Carter get ahead of him.He hadn't planned on Tony Stark either, but that could wait a while.





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> This story started nagging at my mind two days ago. Since then, I've written 7,000 words and I'm not slowing down.
> 
> First few chapters aren't gonna have Tony actually in them, but he'll be showing up once Bucky catches up to Iron Man 2.

Pain. There was pain and fear and blood and something else. He didn’t want to be here. He blinked rapidly, trying to shake the part of his brain that was screaming, kill and get out. 

Kill and get out.

KILL AND GET OUT!

The world swirled around him and the smell of blood was nauseating. There was a body. It was a man in his late forties. Blood ran from his mouth and broken nose. Bruising ringed his neck in black and purple finger shapes.

Footsteps were thumping up the stairs of the apartment building he was standing in. Many footsteps.

“Police! Hands in the air!” was the cry as the door was thrown open.

The Asset didn’t move for a long moment.

It was Bucky that made his knees drop and raised his hands in the air.


	2. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> All info is pulled from the wikis, mostly from MCU stuff with a little from the comics.
> 
> Other knowledge is pulled from Wikipedia and Google.

It was the metallic prosthetic that no one could remove that brought him to SHIELD’s attention. A prosthetic that could function as, not only a real arm, but as anything other than an aesthetic limb to hide a handicap. A functional prosthetic that the police could not figure out how to remove.

Peggy Carter had only been SHIELD Director for three years and absolutely wanted to know about anything interesting her spies could turn up. Sure, she delegated, but she was in charge and they were still small time as a government organization. She wanted to know what was happening, always.

The FBI would probably be interested in him and the CIA was already filling out extradition paperwork on the alleged Russian assassin currently in holding in New York for murdering a politician in his apartment. 

She needed to get to him first.

“Why is there no booking photo?” she asked the spy who delivered her the record. The only photo was a shot of the arm and a very scarred shoulder. The spy frowned. “It should be there, Director.” Peggy went through it again and shook her head. “I’ll find it.”

Peggy sighed and handed back the file. “Add it as soon as you can, please.”

“Yes, Director.”

She walked past him and headed for her car. She had a visit to make, for once glad that the CIA had so much more paperwork to fill out on home soil. She was just going to call and ask for a visit with the mystery assassin.

…

Bucky’s mind was like a shattered glass. Shards of memory, bits of thoughts and chunks of whatever else comprises a human brain stabbed at him. It hurt and pounded and he couldn’t understand what was happening. He remembered fighting a war and he remembered blood and killing and fighting and being captured and being rescued. He remembered his sister and glimpses of his parents.

He remembered Steve Rogers.

It was the things in between. Little things, things easily forgotten, that he desperately wanted to remember. Because if he couldn’t remember those, then what else was he missing? He didn’t know why he’d killed that man or who that man was though he remembered being told to kill him. He didn’t know why his arm was made of metal. He remembered that they’d told him he’d lost it to gangrene. Why had he let his arm get gangrene? Why hadn’t it spread to the rest of him if it had gotten that far. Where was Steve?

He had so many questions and no answers.

No. He had one answer. While he’d been hustled through the police station, a day calendar on a desk told him it was December 16, 1957.

He’d started putting dates to the memories he had. He remembered killing someone not this person, but he didn’t remember when. He remembered the chair over and over but no awareness of time.

Steve Rogers. He remembered meeting Steve they were kids, but that was hazy.

The day Steve’s mom died. October 15 th , 1936.

It was a starting point. He spent two days letting police question him and get nowhere while he shut them out and focused on retracing the steps of his life as more bits of memories slotted into place.

They got nothing from him. They didn’t know who he was. They were just holding him until someone could figure it out. Outside the room, he heard the term CIA which meant nothing to him beyond the fact that they wanted him. 

The last memory he had a specific date for was the day he and other soldiers had been rescued by Steve. Steve had gotten bigger. Steve had been huge and strong and carrying that shield like a goddamned target.

November 3 rd , 1943.

There were memories he thought were after that because this bigger version of Steve was in them, but he couldn’t put them to a date, memories blurring together.

He wasn’t sure when the mindless killing had started. He remembered at least three other people being killed by him that weren’t on the battlefield. He always remembered or caught flashes of his metal arm. He didn’t think he’d had the metal arm when he knew Steve was there.

Cold, chair, compliance, death…

Cold, chair, compliance, death…

Cold, chair, compliance, death…

He couldn’t remember anything else. He didn’t think years fifteen years had passed.

But he didn’t know how to explain the gaps.

“John Doe, get up.”

There was an officer outside his cell. He was alone because they couldn’t get the metal arm off and he didn’t know how to remove it either. It was deemed a weapon and he couldn’t be around the civilian criminals in case he used it against them or they against him.

Bucky stood and stuck his arms through the slot so they could cuff him. He somehow knew the arm was strong enough to break the cuffs without trying, could kill the man before him without the hassle of strangulation. He could snap the copper’s neck and walk away.

But he wouldn’t.

He was Bucky Barnes, he was an American soldier. He wasn’t in charge and he was going to follow orders.  He just wasn't ready to answer questions.

The officer opened the cell door and he stepped out. Another officer, who’d been leaning against an empty cell out of sight, straightened and walked ahead while the other fell behind. He arrived at the interrogation room and was shoved inside. He was set down, cuffed to the table, a tape recorder was turned on and then left alone.

He stared down at his hands, his hair shadowing his face.

The door knob turned and opened. He didn’t look up as he listened to steps click in and the door closed. Click, click, click. 

Those were not standard issue shoes. Those were women’s heels. He lifted his gaze enough to see a woman in matching blazer and skirt taking the seat opposite him. The tape recorder was stopped.

“That arm’s pretty fancy.”

Bucky jerked up. He knew that voice.

Agent Carter.

Steve’s girl. 

The agent’s sharp intake of breath was the only acknowledgement he got. 

“Agent Carter,” he breathed. She was older. Far older than his last memory of her. Still a hell of a dame, though. Her red lips had the slightest moue to them and her eyes had smile lines crinkling them, but her face was morphing into a mask of expressionless.

“Sergeant Barnes,” she said, her voice cold. “You’re dead.”

Bucky paused. “That wouldn’t surprise me.” Time not flowing, Steve not being there, him killing blindly… Steve would never have let him go haring off on his own for so long.

Unless he thought Bucky was dead.

“That’s all you have to say?” Carter asked.

“You marry Steve yet?” he asked instead.

Her hands on the table balled into white-knuckled fists on the table. “Captain Rogers is MIA, presumed dead after crashing an airplane in the Arctic Circle.”

Bucky jerked. “He’s dead?” His face was paling dramatically, and the metal plates of his palm creaked under their pressure.

“Yes,” she whispered. She reached out and touched his flesh hand. He let it fall open and then close around hers while he fought shaking and his watering eyes.

“Sergeant,” she said, her voice firm again. “Why did you kill John Winston?”

“Is that who I killed?”

Carter was good. Now that she had recovered from the shock of seeing him, she was a consummate professional. He wouldn’t talk to the police.

But he would talk to her.

“I don’t know,” he said, finally. “I did what I was told.”

Cold, chair, compliance, death…

“You were told to kill John Winston by whom?”

Bucky shook his head. “They bring me out of the cold, put me in the chair, it hurts, they tell me who to eliminate and how, I return and go back to the cold.”

“What’s the cold?”

“I don’t know.”

“What’s the chair?”

He looked at her with the faintest hint of amusement. “It’s a chair.”

“Why does it hurt?”

“There is water and electricity and words.”

“Words?”

“They’re Russian. I don’t know what they mean.” He felt like he might know Russian if he heard it again, but he couldn’t remember the specific words they were speaking or their meaning.

She took a deep breath. “How many people have you killed since this began?”

Bucky didn’t hesitate. “Six that I remember. But everything is…my memory is full of holes. But I know I killed them. I mean, I don’t really know if it was me, I just have flashes, but it was like I wasn’t in control.”

“Are you planning to plead insanity?”

Bucky shook his head. “I’m guilty. I can’t tell you the names of the other people or the dates, time is...it wasn't relevant. The last memory I have with a date attached is the day Steve rescued us. The next fifteen years are missing except for the chair and blood and…” His hands were shaking as a flash of a muzzle resulted in the falling of a body from three hundred yards away.

“Soldier!” Carter snapped, and he was back in the Interrogation room.

“I’m sorry,” he murmured. The sharp scent of blood had him looking down. He was gripping Carter’s hand so tightly that her slender fingers were crushed while his nails dug into his palm. He released her instantly and grimaced at the bloody halfmoons just below his thumb.

Her hands slid out of sight, likely hiding the fact that she was massaging them. “I can’t protect you entirely, Sergeant,” she said, making him look up.

“I don’t want protection,” he growled. “I know what I did.”

“You do,” she snapped. “The CIA wants you. Scuttlebutt is you’re the Winter Soldier, an assassin from the USSR to kill politically connected opponents to communism or ex-proponents of communism. You have, allegedly killed three American citizens and a handful of Brits and Germans.”

“What’s the CIA?” Bucky asked.

“Central Intelligence Agency. International spy agency for the US. They only operate on foreign soil, officially, but, since no one knows you’re an MIA American war vet, they believe you are a USSR attack dog. They’ll either kill you and bury you in an unmarked grave or trade you back to the USSR for secrets or our spies that have been captured.”

Pain erupted as his flesh tore again when he made a fist. “Firing squad is fine, but I can’t go back. I don’t want to kill anymore.”

Carter took a deep breath. “I run a small government agency: Supreme Headquarters, International Espionage, Law-Enforcement Division. We’re another organization of spies.”

Bucky glared at her. “I don’t want to be a spy either. The chair…it makes me do things that I don’t want to do. If I go back, they’ll put me in the chair and I’ll probably forget what I’m supposed to do. You’ll play right into their hands!”

Carter raised her hand to silence him.

“I’m not recruiting you. I’m saying we hide you. You plead guilty to the murders. We give you a cover identity and prove you’re an American. You’ll be sentenced and you’ll go to prison, but you’ll be safe.”

“I’ll do the time,” Bucky whispered. Louder he said, “Firing squad is still better.”

“Steve wouldn’t want that.”

Bucky jerked. No. Steve would never let him take the easy way out of anything. 

“I can tell what you’re thinking. Stop it. I wouldn’t be able to look Steve in the eye and tell him I signed his best friend’s death warrant. I can’t. I won’t.”

“Agent Carter,” Bucky started, but she shook her head.

“I’m tempted to give you the identification of Buck Rogers just because I can, but,” she paused thinking, “Emmitt Randall will probably do. He’s a spy handle we were planning to use but it’s only partially ready. We’ll just give it to you.”

“What?” he asked.

“I’m a spy, Mr. Randall. It’s what we do.”

Bucky frowned. A new identity, life likely in prison, but still life. There had to be a catch. “What do you get out of this?”

There was no hesitation. “We want your arm. We’ll get it off. I don’t know what will happen about a replacement, but I doubt you’ll get one while inside.”

Bucky swallowed. He thought of the weight of that arm, of its power. He didn’t want it. He didn’t want the thing that could snap a man’s neck with a twitch. “Done,” he whispered.

Carter reached out and patted his flesh hand. With that small gesture of affection, she got up and left.

Before she could close the door, he looked up and said, “SHIELD? Really?”

She leaned back and gave him a tight smile. “Welcome to the New York correctional services system.” The door closed with a snap.


	3. Chapter Two

SHIELD was clearly more than a spy agency. Bucky was led to a science lab that would have made Howard Stark drool over all the tech and cleanliness that hadn’t been there in war-torn Europe.

Of course, then he saw Stark coming toward him with a wan smile. He shook Bucky’s flesh hand. “Good to see you alive, Sergeant,” he said, shooing away his guards/minders with a wave of his hand. “I want you to know I’m still looking for Captain Rogers.”

“You are?” Bucky asked, tentative.

“Sending out ships to trawl the arctic landmasses. The  _ Valkyrie  _ will turn up sooner or later.”

Bucky didn’t know what to say. He knew nothing beyond what Carter had told him. He debated prying, but he was a soldier who didn’t question orders or stick his nose where it didn’t belong. He’d had Steve to do that for him.

“This arm is amazing!” Howard drew his attention back to the present by grabbing the arm and examining it. Bucky had a moment where something in his brain told him to kill and get out, but he fought it, digging his fingers into his palm, and holding as still as possible. “You sure you want to get rid of it?”

“Part of the deal, Stark,” he retorted. “Doubt they’ll let me into general population with it.”

Stark frowned and then winced. “Right. And you’re Randall now too. Pegs needs to get better at this new identity thing. We have to make another new identity now.”

Bucky’s eyes narrowed at the thinly veiled insult. Stark paled at the expression and he cast his eyes back to the arm. “No offense to the Director, of course.”

“Of course,” Bucky said firmly.

“Let’s run some tests,” Stark bit out. “The sooner we do it, the sooner we can get it off.”

Bucky nodded and let Stark work. 

So, apparently, the reason it was so heavy and painful was because the shoulder holster for the arm, for lack of a better term, was attached to his ribs. Stark was still trying to figure out how his ribs weren’t broken when he paused. Then he ordered a blood test.

Three weeks later, he had the results with the new year.

Bucky Barnes, a.k.a. Emmitt Randall had some variation of the Supersoldier Serum.

Fan-fucking-tastic.

Director Carter, as he’d taken to calling her, sat on that piece of information, and sat on it hard. Stark was gagged, and the tech who ran the test was promoted, and then gagged.

Bucky suspected he must have been dosed before Steve had rescued him. It made sense since he’d probably been experimented on, though those flashes were fewer and weaker than the more recent memories of being under someone else’s control. If he needed further proof, the halfmoon cuts on his palm had healed in under an hour. 

Stark was making noise about keeping him as a lab rat but Carter either threatened him or made a deal because he got three extra blood samples, had Bucky run around an indoor gym for three hours before Bucky ran out of steam, made him lift weights of increasing size until he tapped out at 240 lbs in his flesh arm and 375 lbs in the metal one, and then finally,  _ finally _ , detached the arm from its ports. Unfortunately, the arm was not designed to come off.  Bucky’s nerves were attached to wires that made the arm move and they had to be...to be trimmed back and capped.  Stark didn’t really explain what was happening, only that his nerves weren’t actually going to stay exposed. Stark created a cap that was, apparently, a magnet and then attached small, metal caps to Bucky’s nerves as they were separated from the arm.  The pain was astronomical. Morphine did nothing and in the end, Stark and his techs strapped him down and did the rest of the surgery while he screamed and fought and blacked out in a way that should probably worry him if he hadn’t come back to himself with the bars holding him down were looser, but still there.

The caps were magnetized to the arm cap that would cover the exposed guts of the shoulder piece.  Then it was welded shut. No one would be getting in there in a fight.

When the cap was complete, Bucky said goodbye to Stark, as politely as one could after enduring something that felt like torture while he grinned and talked endlessly about the arm and how it would revolutionize prosthetics, and was returned to the police, now with the identity Carter had created.

He was Emmitt Joseph Randall. He was twenty-seven years old. He was born to parents Joseph and Christine Randall in 1930 in Brooklyn, New York. His father was killed in World War II, his mother in childbirth. He’d spent his teen years in an orphanage where he was one among hundreds. Bucky wouldn’t put it past Carter to put false files in their records as proof of his supposed life there.

He had a record of causing trouble. He’d been picked up a handful of times for drunken brawling. He’d killed John Winston over an argument in a bar about a dame. There would be witnesses to swear by it to the coppers, though they wouldn’t have to do it in court because he wasn’t fighting the charge.

He still couldn’t remember the others’ names, but Carter had the names of the two other Americans he’d killed.

He didn’t know how she’d spin their murders or if the judge was read into the situation. Either way, he doubted he’d see sunlight other than through slitted windows for a long time.

…

The judge was definitely read in. He didn’t order an execution, which Bucky was considering a still possible outcome, instead sentencing him to a hundred and eight years, with a chance of parole in fifty-four. Going by his identities age, he would be eighty-one years old by then.

Assuming he lived that long.

Assuming he got paroled.

Carter nodded to him as he was led out. The slam of cell doors when he was shut into Sing Sing echoed in his brain. He sat down on the bunk and ignored the catcalls of the others on his cell block.

…

Peggy stepped into headquarters after Randall’s trial and ignored Stark’s message at the secretary’s desk to come see him. She reached her office.

The file that contained a blend of Sergeant James Buchannan Barnes, the Winter Soldier and Emmitt Randall was sitting, front and center, on her desk.

She picked it up and flipped through it. On the first page was the missing mugshot she’d wanted when a killer with a metal arm had been sitting in lockup.

She took a deep breath, swallowed hard and pulled a fresh file folder from her filing cabinet. She pulled everything relating to the name Barnes. She pulled everything related to the Winter Soldier. All that was left was the false identity, the arrest record with an updated name and the notes on his arm. She stared at the mugshot for a long moment, then pulled it too. All of the papers went into the folder and, from there, to a secure box in a secure vault where the only she, Phillips or Stark could get access. Phillips was on the verge of retiring so she hadn’t informed him one of his subordinates had been found and Stark had his blood and his observations. No one would ever know that the man with the metal arm had been anything more than a man with experimental tech and a short temper that had killed a man.


	4. Chapter Three: The First Identity

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Summer killed me dead. Sorry it's so very late.

Prison was dull, but Bucky was sure that this was better than how it would have been had he still been with his keepers. He could socialize, there was a library of sorts, someone was always looking for a fight when he needed to let out aggression and there was endless opportunity to work out and think about what he’d done.

It was far better than cold, chair, compliance, death…

Time moved very strangely. It would drag and fly by at intervals. 

He’d been locked up for a month before the first attack happened. He’d been having nightmares about killing every night for a week when guys from rival gangs started beating the hell out of each other. Punches, he could ignore, but it was the flash of silver in one man’s hand that set him off. He was in his memories, blood dripping from his metal hand where it had repeatedly connected with someone else’s face.

When he came to, he was on his stomach with three guards on top of him. Everyone else who’d been fighting was unconscious and bloody.

Another time, someone said something in Russian. Bucky was back only when guards were trying to pry his fingers from the speaker’s neck.

Each of these were followed by weeks in isolation that would end when he next had a visitor. 

News trickled in via the occasional newspaper he got his hands on and things that Carter thought might interest him.

A wall was built to split Berlin in half.  There were a bunch of jokes about President Kennedy allegedly referring to himself as a jelly doughnut in German.

Anti-war sentiment was growing.

Civil rights was on the upswing.  The assassination of the President Kennedy proved a tipping point and when civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King jr. and Malcolm X were assassinated in turn, their views, power and sympathy to the cause only seemed to grow.  

The US beat the USSR to get someone on the moon.  An inmate on his block swore up and down that it was staged.

In 1970, Sing Sing became Ossining Correctional Facility.  This had zero impact on him but people bitched about it endlessly.

And Stark had a kid.

Stark would visit twice a year to tell him that his trips to the Arctic continued to prove fruitless. 

“Chip of the old block, I’m telling you,” Stark told him. He had a proud smile, but his eyes were red-rimmed and his left hand shook. “Genius for certain. Soon as he’s old enough, he’ll come on the expeditions with me.”

Bucky only nodded. Stark reminded him of the drunks in the Depression, trying to stay sober as long as they could because they couldn’t afford both booze and food for their families. Not that Stark couldn’t afford liquor but drunk driving to Sing Sing seemed like a bad idea all around.

Stark stopped talking about his kid after the first three years except to rant about how he wasn’t good enough yet. He still went on expeditions to the Arctic. He still came back with nothing.

Every passing year, he became more withdrawn, staying less long, becoming more haggard and definitely buzzed.

Carter, on the other hand, came every other month or so. She gave him any news she thought he’d find interesting that might not make it into the prison.  She also spoke of innocuous things that were clearly code for what she was actually doing at SHIELD. Bucky didn’t understand a lot of it, but he did get that she was starting to train a successor. His name was Marcus and he was apparently a spitfire. He was going to be impressive someday, though right now, he was already a smooth operator of a spy who was good at making connections and charismatic. He just lacked experience.

Bucky warned her about Stark. She told him Stark had left SHIELD when she said his drinking was getting out of control. She also spoke of Stark’s son, Tony, whose name he'd had to learn the name from her. She agreed with Stark that the boy was a genius but, while Stark complained, Carter had nothing but praise for her Godson. She showed him pictures of a cute kid with dark hair and big, brown eyes.

“Kid’s gonna be a heartbreaker, someday,” Bucky said. Carter chuckled and agreed.

There was a war in Vietnam that had been going since before he was incarcerated that seemed to finally be winding down.  Inmates talked about getting blown up by Soviet nukes. There were drills on what to do if a nuclear bomb was to hit the prison that involved hiding under tables.  Bucky asked Carter about it and she rolled her eyes and asked if he’d read any history books about how the war ended. She didn’t need to clarify which war.

“America dropped atomic bombs on two cities in Japan,” Bucky answered.

“So you know that a bomb like that would not be stopped by a table.”

“So why do we have drills?” he asked, already knowing the answer.

“Because it makes civilians feel better.”  She shrugged. “For what it’s worth, nothing will happen.  Our spies say they’re as terrified of pushing the big, red button as we are.”

“Oh good,” Bucky said, deadpan.

The PLO massacred civilians in the Middle East.  A  _ lot _ of them.

The Watergate Scandal which involved eavesdropping using phone lines happened.  It wasn’t something that impacted him except to find it interesting that a president would actually resign his post. 

It was Carter who finally pointed out that he wasn’t really aging. From 1958 to 1978, he still had brown, longish hair that he cropped back whenever a fight in general population resulted in hair pulling, that never greyed despite the stress of never seeing enough sunlight and being trapped in close quarters with so many others. He hadn’t gained more than a couple wrinkles around his eyes and, after staring for so long into the five inches of mirror in his cell, maybe one of the smile lines around his mouth had deepened a bit, though it sure wasn’t from smiling.

Carter had a plan and he left it in her capable hands. By 1979, he was Bradley Park, a transfer to a new cell block with the same parole date as Emmitt Randall, a man who went to the hospital one day and never came back.

**Author's Note:**

> Let me know what you think!


End file.
